How is PLG marketing different than non PLG marketing?

Marketing fundamentals are the same whether your growth strategy is PLG or traditional outbound marketing (and the two are not exclusive!): you still need to understand your target market, develop effective messaging, and get in front of the right people at the right moment. At SurveyMonkey, we engage in both PLG and traditional marketing as part of our overall GTM strategy. With PLG, we are thinking strategically about how the product itself can act as a channel for delivering our message, conv ...Read More

IMO, the easiest way to separate PLG marketing from non PLG marketing is to think about the touchpoints you cover as a product marketer, as well as the audiences you address. These will differ across PLG and non PLG motions, in the following ways: Touchpoints A PLG product marketer is across the different steps of a user's journey. Because growth and activation in PLG comes from offering a frictionless first-time user experience (FTUE), your role in product marketing is to "grease the skids" acr ...Read More

There are two main ways tech companies make money:- sales-led: a salesperson works with a customer and closes the deal (which was the norm for decades) - self-serve: a customer can manually enter their credit-card information into the product to purchase something, bypassing a human. Self-serve/credit-card sales is only one aspect of product-led growth (PLG), which also includes using the product to sign up customers (which humans used to own), activate them (which humans used to own), upgrade t ...Read More

The major difference is that you’re not trying to convince someone upfront to sign a contract and then try the product. You are basically putting a minimal amount of friction (e.g., email signup/maybe small trial fee) and saying hey, try this and I bet you’ll like it. It really means that the product and all product activation touchpoints (email, in product messaging, support, etc.) all have to be aligned and in service of getting the user to recognize value as quickly as possible so that they’l ...Read More

To simplify, PLG (Product-Led Growth) focuses on self-service, where marketing and product efforts enable customers to explore, understand, and adopt the product independently, without direct human interaction. This approach demands: Market Awareness: Making potential users aware of the product. Education: Clearly explain the product's value and operation. Onboarding: Guiding users to start using the product smoothly. Activation: Encouraging users to engage with the product actively. Adoption: S ...Read More